History is brought alive in the most dramatic and spectacular ways in son-et-lumiere or sound-and-light shows. I had seen one in the imposing Red Fort, and one in the enchanting Golconda Fort. In these shows the ruins become a grand amphitheatre, and powerful narration accompanied by imaginative use of light and sound recreates the events of a bygone era. But it was only at the Cellular Jail in the Andamans that I realized that a son-et-lumiere show can be so intense that it can move you to tears. The baritone voice of Om Puri and the endearing voice of Naseerudin Shah recreated the mindless torture that was perpetrated on our freedom fighters in that bleak island called Kaala Paani. Torture so inhuman that it will put Guantanamo Bay to shame. I remember in tragic detail the story of Veer Savarkar. Made to live in a 5x5 cell for 11 solitary years, directly facing the place where they hanged a man almost every second day, the British tried to break his will. A diehard patriot that he was, he used to sing to the birds on the overhanging trees the patriotic poems that he had scribbled in the waking hours of the morning. And then he would ask them to learn these songs by heart and fly across the treacherous ocean and sing them freely in his motherland.
At the Residency in Lucknow, the theatre where India’s First War of Independence was waged, sadly there was no sound-and-light show. But inspired by the awesome show in the Andamans, I created one in my mind, aided and abetted by the guide who narrated the story of the Lucknow Siege in historic detail.
During that war, which the British referred to dismissively as the Sepoy Mutiny, over 1300 Britishers living in the city of Lucknow panicked and took refuge in the residence of Sir Henry Lawrence. The advancing troop of freedom fighters trapped them inside the Residency in one of the bloodiest and longest sieges in the world. Supplies of food, water and medicines were completely cut off, and a fierce battle raged on. It took all of 27 days for a small relief platoon to break through the barricade, but soon they too were trapped inside. And the siege continued for another 60 gruelling days. Thousands died on either side; but it’s believed that more captives died inside the Residency due to starvation and disease than due to bullets.
The remnants of the Residency today has a church, a mosque, a school, a post office, a jail and a stable. Each one deeply scarred with the pockmarks of cannon balls and sniper bullets. But the graveyard near the church shows the Great Imperial Divide. The British have individual tombstones with flowery epitaphs engraved on them, whereas the Indians who fought for the British against their own brethren have been given an anonymous mass burial. Perhaps it was poetic justice for having betrayed their own brothers.
The red-brick structures stand in mute testimony to the will and the determination of the very first in our long line of freedom fighters. In those 87 days of embattlement the very edifice of the British Empire was shaken to its foundations; though it took another 90 years for it to completely come crumbling down.
It left me wondering why such a dramatic theatre like the Residency doesn’t have a son-et-lumiere show. Probably it’s because in India there is so much of history that every second stone we stumble upon is a relic. And familiarity breeds contempt of history.
